


In Which This is Real and Everything is Underneath

by Acai



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, They're cute and I hate them, gentle bois, hand holding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 00:12:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10650987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: Sometimes nothing seems real.Lance always has way of bringing Keith back.





	In Which This is Real and Everything is Underneath

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Posting Klance at 4am? It's more likely than you think.

   Everything that he thinks is real is perhaps not real at all. He knows, of course, that it is. As much as it all feels a hundred miles away, disconnected and too far, he knows that it is real. The endless circle of wake up, go to school, sit in class, go home, go to bed—it’s real and ceaseless and forever. Until, of course, it will all end. Because it will all end, someday. Until then his brain will tell him that nothing is real when it is, of course, very real.

 

He leaves. Of course Keith leaves. Why would he stay, when nothing is real and he never wanted to go to college anyway? Or flight school, for that matter. Flight school seemed like a good proposition for a kid who got bounced from foster home to foster home so often that he never really understood what home was at all. It was a good idea for a boy who got good grades, because his report card was all that stayed with him, and it determined everything about him. How strange, that the only thing to define him wasn’t real or physical in anyway, but a digital record of every academic failure and accomplishment he’d ever known. Did that really define him? He had good grades, but was he inherently a good person?

 

So Keith leaves, to a place that seems just as unreal as everything in his distorted, clouded mind. He can’t explain it, the dissociation from everything. He can’t explain that his head feels five hundred miles away and he doesn’t really  _ feel  _ when he touches, doesn’t really  _ hear  _ when he listens, because he’s too far away. Nothing feels real, everything looks and sounds and feels cloudy and far away, like he’s surrounded in bubble wrap.

 

Nothing feels real, nobody feels real. Of course, some people are more vibrant than others. Most people are monochrome, but some are sepia. It’s not as good as colors were, but isn’t some better than none? Everything is out in the open for everybody to see, Keith thinks. Even if there’s nobody there  _ to  _ see, if somebody  _ was  _ there they’d be able to see all of Keith, written out in ink, forever there for them to see and read as easily as a book. He’d like to think that someday there would be a time in which he was real and everything was underneath, where nobody could see.

Of course Keith thinks it’s not real when he finds himself in a giant castle of a warship with a princess and some mice and robot-lions and people who seem to be, in fact, very real. None of it seems logically real, and Keith thinks he’s really, finally lost it. None of it is real, none of it is real, none of it is real.

 

They’re not all in monochrome. Pidge is easy to get along with, easy to talk to casually about who-knows-what for who-knows-why. Shiro is, of course, important enough that he feels at least a little real, at least a little colorful. He’s familiar enough from memories of a time on Earth when things seemed real and permanent, even if only for a little while, before things had gone chaotic and he’d been shuffled back into the system like one card in a deck of fifty-two. They’re sepia, and it’s a nice break from the usual black and white.

 

And then there’s Lance, who’s not monochrome or sepia at all. It’s hard, it really is, to think that somebody’s not real when they’re so vivid and bright and hard to miss. He seems so sure of himself, so confident and easy-going and naturally joking. Keith decides this is Lance’s ‘tell’. His ‘tell’ that he’s not really real, just colorful. He’s not real, because nobody real can be so consistently happy and perfect, of course.

 

But Lance has another tell. His second tell is that he’s not really happy. For all he smiles, he’s never laughed. For all he flirts, he never really cares about the recipient of the flirtations. Lance’s eyes are ethereal, but Lance’s eyes are sad. Keith is forced to believe that Lance is real, because real people pretend to be perfect when they are, in fact, very hurt. He acts egotistical to overwrite the fact that he is demurral. He acts imperturbable and phlegmatic to disguise the fact that he is tempestuous and ardent. But he’s not fake, not in the sense that he’s not real. He’s only eliciting the others to read him as somebody who he is not. Keith thinks, rather than thinking this is a  _ bad  _ thing, that this is an admirable thing.

 

(What would he be if he could do the same? Who would he make himself?)

 

The way Keith sees it, there’s no way that Lance could be surreal in any way. He’s too vibrant, too colorful, too  _ there  _ to be unreal. Everything seems illogical and impossible except for Lance, who has no idea how real he seems to be to Keith. Everything feels hundreds of miles away, but Lance feels a little closer.

 

It’s not pining, it’s not want or need or selfish greed. It’s just the way that it is. Keith feels like there should be color left lingering on his skin when he touches Lance, like the color from Lance should rub off onto him like wet ink rubbing off of paper. There’s never any blue left smudged on the black and white of Keith, though. Keith thinks maybe, if they touch long enough, it will leave a trace of color at least. Lance doesn’t question it when Keith starts to inch his hand closer and closer to Lance’s, until their hands are linked and don’t untangle for another few hours. It becomes habit, the way that cycles become habitual when the cycles are just cold facade and fact. Lance goes with it, grinning and putting up a facade of exasperation. 

(Lance is not exasperated.)

 

When they finally stop touching to go to dinner, there’s not any color left on Keith’s hand. Nothing’s rubbed off, and that’s a little disheartening, but there’s a feeling of groundedness that comes with being with Lance. Rather than hundreds of miles away, he feels only inches away from the real world. Perhaps Lance is aware of this, perhaps he is not. Either way, he seems alright with just sitting when everything feels so far away that Keith couldn’t  _ possibly  _ give him a reply, not when he can’t even remember his nameagepastlikesdislikesaddress. 

 

Lance talks instead, not requiring a reply, but just sitting and touching and rubbing his array of colors onto Keith. It’s grounding, not always quickly, but never not at all. Eventually Keith always comes close enough to reality, and then he offers half-hearted replies to the conversation in the place of a thank you. Lance seems to understand, even if it has never been blatantly stated.

Keith doesn’t understand Lance most of the time. He doesn’t understand how Lance can be so clueless and so perceptive at the same time, he doesn’t understand how Lance can be so blunt and so gentle at once, and he doesn’t understand how Lance knows when to talk without waiting for a reply and when to make sure to give Keith time to offer one up. 

Keith doesn’t think he has a tell. He doesn’t  _ think  _ there’s anything about him that clearly changes when he feels like he’s ten thousand miles away, but there must be. There must be, for it to be so easily spotted by Lance. 

It might just be a talent of his, though.

Lance has a myriad of talents, without any correlation to one another, that he’s good at. Things like flexibility and languages that he doesn’t even recall learning, but has always had as a part of himself, as well as other things, like painting, that he can recall taking lessons over and working hard at during his years in primary school. He doesn’t paint much--there’s usually not anything to paint  _ with-- _ but when he does, he uses all the empty space in the halls outside of their rooms. Lance doesn’t paint with any defined lines, and he doesn’t paint any clear images, but he blends the colors together and only uses the warmest, brightest colors that he can get his hands on. The walls turn from a cold gray to a neon, glowing ember, and Keith can just barely make out a girl who dances in the middle of the fire. 

There’s no blue in the painting, but there’s blue on Lance’s hands. It’s smudged and messy now that he’s washed off the brushes and mason jars. Still, when their hands link together afterwards the blue rubs off of Lance’s hands and onto Keith. 

He doesn’t even think Lance notices, but after they’ve separated for the night and gone off to bed he stares down at his hands. It’s a cold color, and it speaks of cold and winter and dead trees hibernating until the sun beckons them back out. It’s a cold color, but it makes Keith feel unexplainably warm to see. A physical reminder that the painting outside of their rooms was real, that Lance was real, and that his memory of walking down the hall with their hands linked was real as well. 

Keith doesn’t wash the paint off, and he knows that it’ll probably stain his hands now, but he doesn’t really mind. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There’s a nagging feeling in the pit of Keith’s stomach. It’s eating away at everything inside of him and rubbing away at his mind and his eyes, turning everything clouded and hazy and chasing reality hundreds of miles away. 

The sounds aren’t real, the feelings aren’t real, his memories aren’t real, the bed underneath him isn’t real,  _ he  _ isn’t real, nothing is real. Nothing is real at all. He’s just dreaming, just invented, just floating in a void of nothingness. 

He’s not breathing because he can’t remember how, but he doesn’t suppose he really needs to anyway. If he isn’t real then he cannot die, and therefore he doesn’t need to take air into his lungs. 

The pain isn’t real when his fingernails dig into the palms of his hands, and the red isn’t real when his nails dig into his arm and dig until blood starts to pool up. It’s not real, he can’t feel it, and when he looks at it he can only see it behind a cloud of haziness. 

It doesn’t hurt, but it hurts. 

It doesn’t hurt that he’s digging away into his skin, but it hurts that nothing is real, that he cares about things that he can’t touch or see or hear. That his mind is inventing things for him to cherish, but he can’t have any of them. 

His crying isn’t real, the floor under him isn’t real, the pain in his arms isn’t real, nothing is real. He’s just alone in his void, and he can’t ever wake up from any of it. 

Nothing is real at all, it’s biting away at him and clawing away at his arms and eating away at his stomach, making it feel like a knife is in his gut and it’s twisting, because it  _ hurts.  _

“Stop that,” Lance says, and Keith knows he’s just imagined him here. He’s just another thing in Keith’s head that Keith can’t touch, feel, see, hear, but he allows himself to pretend for a moment that he’s truly there. Lance’s hands, should they truly be able to touch him, are tugging Keith’s own hands away from his arms and tangling their fingers together into a tight grip. 

Keith drags in a long breath of air and then chokes on his own life force. 

Lance’s eyes trail up from Keith’s arms, and he hesitantly drops one of Keith’s hands for a moment to wipe away some of the saltwater from his face. “Breathe,” he advises, picking Keith’s hand back up and settling down to sit across from him. 

“Can’t,” Keith chokes out, squeezing his eyes closed and wrapping his own fingers more tightly around Lance’s, as if he can squeeze tightly enough that Lance will become real. 

“You can,” Lance argues calmly. “But you aren’t trying.”

He presses Keith’s hand against his chest, taking an exaggerated breath in so that he can feel the rise and fall of it undoubtedly. 

“Just do it with me.” 

Keith tries, for a moment, to breathe in and out at the same steady pace, but he hasn’t got lungs to hold the air.

Lance slows down. Keith tries again. There’s no such thing as air.

He’s suffocating, but Lance says, “there you go,” so he figures he must not be suffocating too quickly now. 

“It’s not  _ real, _ ” Keith pleads, trying to explain, because surely Lance has got to know too, right? “This, you, me, everything.” 

Lance doesn’t reply, and Keith drags their hands a little further down Lance’s chest, where he can’t feel the rise and fall as easily. Lance moves them back. 

“Do you remember when we went to that planet in Fornax? With the people who didn’t speak?” Lance asks. He waits until Keith nods, slowly and hesitantly as ever, before continuing on with his story. He launches into it in that way that Lance does things, quickly and boldly, without leaving any room at all for hesitation. 

Keith’s skin feels like it’s covered in bug bites, itching and uncomfortable. 

Lance’s voice is a warm cinnamon brown, in nice contrast to the too-angry and too-bright red that Keith can feel radiating off of himself.  By the time that he’s managed to pull his mind together enough to actually listen to Lance’s story, it’s too late to really understand what’s going on within the tale. Keith listens anyway, because it’s better than feeling the imaginary bug bites on his skin. And because Lance’s voice is always nice to listen to. 

Keith focuses on the sound of Lance’s voice, and he focuses on the warmth that’s coming off of their hands where they’re linked together, and he concentrates just a little bit on the rise and fall of Lance’s chest. The world starts to put itself back together, piece by piece, until it’s a world once more and not a collection of messily-scattered pieces. 

Lance must notice, because he brings his story to a conclusion (Keith still doesn’t really understand what’s going on), and he relaxes a little bit more. 

“I don’t believe a word of that,” Keith says, and his voice is a little bit shaky and a little bit scratchy, but he can’t bring himself to care.

“It happened!” Lance protests, wagging a finger at Keith. “I almost  _ died. _ ” 

“You didn’t,” Keith disagrees, for sake of devil’s advocate, and yawns as punctuation for the sentence. 

Lance’s gaze softens a little bit. “That was cute,” he says. “I hate you.” 

Keith sends him the heaviest glare that he can muster, moving to stagger up off the floor. It’s not swaying underneath him anymore, and he’s going to take that as a good sign. Lance gets up with him, much more quickly, as if he’s doing so urgently. His eyes flick down for just a moment, and Keith decides to not glance down at his arms himself. 

He lets Lance tug him down the halls and sit him down, and allows him then to clean off his arms as he pretends that it doesn’t burn like hell. Lance wraps the bandages carefully, making sure that they’re even and not too tight, and Keith feels a wave of guilt threaten to make the world tilt underneath his feet again. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, drawing back his arms and finishing the wrapping up himself, more quickly and less carefully. 

Lance’s eyebrows knit together. He’s dense. 

Keith elaborates. “For making you help with that. I know it’s not fun to deal with.” 

“Well--,” Lance pauses, seeming to have to collect his thoughts for a moment before continuing. “Well,  _ yeah,  _ it’s not. But only because you’re, like, hurting. And it’s definitely worse for you to deal with, so if I can maybe, like, help out with it, then… I will, if I can.” 

“You do.” Keith leans back against the wall. “But you don’t have to.” 

“I’m going to,” Lance mumbles, finishing cleaning up around the sink and offering a hand out to help Keith get up. “Cause I care about you.” 

Keith smirks.

Lance scowls at him. “ _ Shut up,”  _ he says, but he still links their hands together when Keith stands and knocks their shoulders together as they walk back to their rooms. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: Aobajosighs


End file.
